It's costing the city a lot of money to make sure Trump Tower is safe for the president-elect, but how much can the city expect to get from the federal government to do it? NY1's Courtney Gross filed the following report.

The heart of Manhattan has become a sea of blue. 

The NYPD has taken over Midtown, on foot and in the air.  

Semi-automatic weapons, an elevated surveillance station and officers, lots of them.

This is all to protect a president in waiting. 

NY1 has learned the NYPD has a new estimate of what it will take to keep Donald Trump safe. The number is at least $500,000 a day. Officials emphasize it could go much higher. The number is only temporary for the transition. 

"We're putting in the paperwork now for the first traunch of reimbursement," Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday.

The number includes preparing for protests and traffic control. 

It seems reasonable to some. It's just a question of who is paying for it. 

"We do know in New York, the one motto we have when providing security is, cover it in blue. We put a lot of blue around the president. And the fact is that the federal government recognizes that the NYPD is the right agency to do this job," said Mitchell Moss of New York University.

The NYPD would not give us exact details about where all this money would be going, but they did say the vast majority of it is for manpower. 

"We are going to work very very hard to get a very substantial number of reimbursement, and I feel good about our chances, based on the history of reimbursement," said Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Take the pope's visit last year. The total cost of security for his two-day stay was $11.3 million, and that's what the city received from the federal government. 

Home to the United Nations, foreign dignitaries are often coming to the five boroughs, and the city gets cash for that, too. 

The cost of providing security for foreign officials in fiscal year 2015 was $29.3 million. The city received $20.9 million in federal funding.  

Officials are keeping their fingers crossed the feds come through this time. 

"It's a federal responsibility, so I'm working on getting the federal government to pay for it," said Sen. Charles Schumer.